Wenceslas, Square and Upside Down

Several of my best friends here are out of town this weekend, so not much socializing available. Still, I forced myself, yesterday, to get off the sofa and get out, at least a little bit, before the 6:30 pm Crystal Palace game.

I started the morning by walking down to Wenceslas Square, to the Starbucks there that is, at least as far as I (and Google Maps) could determine, the only coffee shop outside the train station open at 7 am. It's about a 20-25 minute walk away — I got there at about 7:15.

The red dot is Starbucks

Turns out this was ... a mistake. Coffee and croissant in hand, I walked up to their spacious, and vacant, second floor seating area. Shortly after I sat myself down and opened up my laptop, however, the cleaning woman appeared, and started mopping around the entire area, scooting the approximately 14,000 (from what I gathered) wooden chairs loudly out of her way throughout, and sniffing while she worked.

That experience concluded, they turned on the loud pop music — whether for the staff or the presumably young/international customers gathering for super-early-morning coffee, I have no idea. Who knows — perhaps it's even designed to make longer stays there untenable, to keep us all moving. If so, it worked ... all too well, as I won't be coming back.

Ultimately the fault is mine, of course. Wenceslas Square is the Prague version of Times Square in the US, and expecting any Starbucks there to be clean, quiet, and calm, whether at 4 pm or 7 am, is probably unwise. Still. If you're in Prague, and you want an early morning coffee, I recommend against the Starbucks at Wenceslas Square. 

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Yes, those are functioning balconies

The second trip downtown, in the afternoon, was more successful. I took the advice of several American friends and went to Kino Lucerna — which, according to its website, "was inaugurated on March 12, 1909, and ... is was one of the oldest cinema halls still in operation across Europe and the world" — to see The Brutalist. This isn't my first time at Kino Lucerna — among other things, Liesel and I saw Amy, the Amy Winehouse documentary, there back in 2015 — but it's always a treat.

As for The Brutalist ... well. It's certainly interesting to see that the early-19th century literary trope of "old" Europe being represented in American fiction as rotten, decaying, and corrupting, compared to the innocent-and-therefore-virtuous America, has now been reversed, so we see European (and Jewish) immigrant Laszlo Toth, our protagonist, insisting, in tears, that there's something "rotten" in America, something wrong. (Especially interesting that Israel is represented, by contrast, as the only real place Jews can (or should?) call "home.")

Which, fair enough, I guess. But fascinating that the concept of dynamism, of America as a place of safety and reinvention, and of representing, as Lincoln had it, "the last best hope of earth," is being expressly rejected.

The movie was beautifully shot (in VistaVision!), compelling, and beautifully acted, and it's certainly challenging and engaging. That being said, the message is muddied and the dialog is ponderous, with every sentence expressed mournfully, preceded by a four-second pause to emphasize its importance, and not one person acting or talking like an actual human being. There is no laughter, ever, no suggestion that any character talks about the weather or traffic jams, and in a fairly familiar trope (see my grad school paper on The Ox-Bow Incident), the only characters portrayed as kind and virtuous are the handicapped wife and the African-American friend.

(The only person we ever see our protagonist actively being kind to is the African-American man who quickly becomes his friend, which allows the director to demonstrate his superior character in one simple stroke. The character is eventually abandoned in a similar stroke much later in the movie — this time our hero is mean to him, demonstrating his increasing instability and fall-from-grace, and Gordon is never mentioned again).

This is all ok, to an extent. The Ox-Bow Incident is a simple American classic despite relying on —indeed, depending on, in some ways creating similar dynamics, and I don't need absolute "realism" in dialog. I love the early movies of David Mamet — House of Games and Homicide, for instance — and their dialog is famously stilted and arch. That's part of the fun.

Still, here, in an almost four-hour film, it all gets a bit ... serious and self-important. I'm not sure the movie benefits from that.

But it's never less than engaging, and the movie surprises you (though the pivotal act and final denouement all sort of come out of the blue near the end, as if the writer/director realized he hadn't actually set up any kind of conclusion), and is, as I said, beautiful. Three out of four stars certainly, but a classic? Nah.

One Gimlet, please

Anyway, despite the intermission and the gorgeous concession stand — no popcorn, but mixed drinks, beer, or espresso drinks — I didn't partake, and afterwards took a quick photo of the great statue hanging outside the cinema, then took the tram back home.

Makes me smile every time

According to one website I just checked, "the statue of King Wenceslas on a skeleton hose that was sculpted by Czech artist David Černý [that] questions the status quo of public sculpture."

Another website says "the sculpture is a mocking reference to the more famous equestrian statue of Kind (and later, Saint) Wenceslas that sits in Wenceslas Square, and possibly a mocking nod to Czech president Vaclav Klaus, although the artist will not say what his intentions were."

And nor should he. Good for him.

Anyway, I stopped at the gym on the way home for a little bit, and got home in time to make a bath and some bolognese sauce, so I could eat during the eventually disappointing Crystal Palace game.

Some doubles with a friend (and two friends of his) this afternoon at Štvanice, the island in the Vltava sort of given over to tennis (I'll walk again, to get a little bit of exercise), then home to order pizza and watch the Michigan basketball game. We'll hope for more success today.

Yesterday, West. Today, North.